“I’ll be right where?” I asked as he hung up. “Who was that?”
“Barry. He wants to talk to you.”
Barry owned the Crossroads Bar across the lot. “He called you?” I asked, puzzled. “Why didn’t he call me? He knows my number.”
Mick looked at me with tolerant amusement. “Where’s your cell phone, Janet?”
My hand went to the holder on my belt to find it empty. I remembered I’d had to use a payphone in Gallup to call Mick earlier, and I had no idea where I’d left the damn thing this time. I was hard on cell phones. I either lost them in stupid places, or they got crunched during my adventures. The magic mirror was a more reliable communication device between me and Mick anyway.
“I don’t know,” I had to say.
“It’s probably in Ansel’s room,” he said. “Or in the refrigerator. Hope it’s not in a potted plant this time.”
“That only happened once.” I hadn’t retrieved it before the maid had watered the plant . . . a couple of times. “Does Barry want to talk right now?”
“He said as soon as you can. I’ll look for your phone.” Mick dismounted the bike, touched my chin, and kissed my lips again. “I just like the look on your face when I tease you about it.”
I liked the look on his face when he teased me. I returned the kiss with some heat then took myself across the parking lot to the Crossroads Bar.
Barry’s bar had been in business far longer than my hotel, which had stood derelict until I’d had the whim to buy the place and open it. My hotel had a saloon, but that was more for tourists and guests who would be way out of place in Barry’s biker hangout.
The Crossroads was a real bar, dark inside with a long counter, barstools chosen for their function not beauty, pool tables, and tables and chairs that had seen better days. Barry carried every kind of liquor a person could want, but mostly he sold beer. He had no magic, and he wasn’t fond of serving the magical. If I hadn’t ridden up here the first day on a Harley, I doubted he’d have spoken to me at all.
Barry had opened his doors a half hour ago, but he had only two customers—a man from Flat Mesa who came there regularly to hide out from his wife, and a tough-looking youngish guy I’d never seen before.
I slid onto a barstool and watched Barry put away clean beer mugs.
“Guy over there says he wants to talk to you.” Barry jerked his chin at the tough-looking man. “Find out what he wants and make him go away. I don’t want any trouble, understand?”
I understood. Barry’s bar had gotten busted up in a raid earlier this year, and while Sheriff Jones had done the raiding, it had happened, indirectly, because of me.
“Got it,” I said.
Barry gave me a dark look but let me go. I walked to the tough-looking guy’s table and sat down. He was drinking beer from a bottle, holding the bottle with battle-scarred hands.
“I’m Janet,” I said.
He looked me up and down, his eyes pale blue against tanned skin. He’d buzzed his blond hair so short it was only a golden sheen on his head.
“You’re guarding the Nightwalker,” he said.
Oh, perfect. I hadn’t met a slayer in years, but today I got to chat with two of them.
“My Nightwalker is harmless,” I said. “He drinks cow blood from a jug.”
“That’s not what I hear. And there’s no such thing as a harmless Nightwalker. They’re vermin, and vermin need to be exterminated.”
“Well, this one’s off limits. He’s under my protection.”
The look the slayer skimmed over me told me he wasn’t impressed. “What are you? Witch?”
“Stormwalker. Not the same thing.” I could have boasted that my boyfriend was a dragon, but dragons weren’t too keen on people knowing they existed. I hadn’t forgotten Mick’s mention of dragonslayers, which I had not liked.
“Whatever you are, this is a courtesy visit,” the slayer said. “There’s a bounty on the Nightwalker, and I intend to collect it. So take some advice, sweetheart. Clear out of my way, and you and your boyfriend might just stay alive.”
If he expected me to cower in terror, he didn’t know anything about Stormwalkers. I rested my elbows on the table and regarded him calmly. “Who set the bounty?”
His disgusted look told me he’d expected better of me. “Like I said, this is a courtesy visit. I’m the best slayer in the country, and I’ll go right through you to get to the Nightwalker if I have to.” He leaned toward me around his beer. “Be a shame to see someone as hot as you be sliced down the middle.”
His aura showed me no magic in him whatsoever—he was as mundane as Barry. But I didn’t need to read his aura to know that he was a hard man, an experienced fighter, and had killed in the past—Nightwalker, human—he didn’t much care about the difference.
“Yeah, that would be a shame,” I said. “You might want to know that someone else tried to collect the bounty this morning. Man with two crossbows. He came up against me, and he ran away.”
What might have been a smile creased the man’s mouth. “I know the slayer you’re talking about. He’s good at running away. Me, not so much.” He pulled a card from a pocket in his vest and slid it across the table to me. “If you want to negotiate, you text me.”
I left the card where it was. “How many other slayers have come to town looking for the bounty? Am I going to have a Slayer Fest on my hands?”
The hint of smile again. “A couple others, but they’re pussies. I’m the one you have to worry about. You’re a sweet little thing, and I thought I’d spare your boyfriend some grief. If you and he get out of the way and let me through, no one will get hurt.”
“Except my Nightwalker.”
He shrugged. “That’s the whole point.”
I looked at the name on the card. “All right . . . Rory. Thanks for the warning. I’ll keep it in mind.”
“You need to take this seriously, honey—”
Rory’s words cut off with a startled noise as he looked at something behind me. I turned to see what had made him choke.
A large woman had moved quietly to our table. I hadn’t seen her come in, which was odd, because she was definitely noticeable. She wore traditional Navajo garb—a long dark skirt and velvet shirt, squash blossom turquoise necklace, and turquoise and silver rings and bracelets. She was tall and wide, but the word fat never occurred to me when I looked at her. Bear was big and formidable, but she held a timeless beauty in her unlined face and fall of thick, jet-black hair.
“This man smells of death,” she said in her low, rich voice.
Chapter Five
“He’s a slayer,” I said to Bear. “Occupational hazard.”
“You should come away from him.”
“I agree.” I rose and snatched up Rory’s card, not because I’d be texting him, but because it contained his full name, and I planned to find out everything I could about him.
I put my fists on the table. “Let me explain something, Rory. My Nightwalker’s off limits. Spread the word. And get out of the bar. Barry doesn’t like you.”
The slayer wasn’t looking at me. He had his full attention on Bear, trying to figure out what she was and whether he should be afraid of her. His eyes told him harmless woman, but I knew his gut was screaming at him in primal terror.
I could have told Rory he had plenty of reason to fear her. Bear was a goddess, one of the oldest, almost as old as Coyote, though I wasn’t certain. She, like Coyote, was a shifter god, and what she shifted into was a giant grizzly bear. Rory was feeling the basic instinct to flee from danger, like all little animals did from giant predators.
Bear only looked at him. Rory took a quick drink from his beer bottle, wiped his mouth, threw down a tip as he got up, and quickly walked away from the table and out. Bright sunlight flashed through the dark bar as he opened the door and then vanished. Barry gave me a nod of thanks then went back to wiping beer mugs, his worry over.
*** *** ***
I left for the sunsh
ine outside with Bear. The day’s temperature had climbed to over a hundred, and my skin prickled with the heat.
“You gave the slayer something to think about,” I said. We watched Rory mount a motorcycle and head out down the highway toward Winslow. He never looked back. “Thanks.”
“He’s not wrong about Nightwalkers, my friend,” Bear said. “And Ansel might have killed this woman.”
That Bear knew all the details didn’t surprise me. If she hadn’t figured them out by herself, she would have gotten the story out of Mick.
“I want to hear Ansel’s side before I hand him over to a slayer,” I said.
“I too have come to like this creature who calls himself Ansel. I will not let a human slayer come near him.”
No, she’d let me finish him off if need be. If Ansel had to be slain, best leave it to a friend, right?
I blew out my breath. “Why did you come to the bar? Were you looking for me?”
Bear gave me a slow nod. “Cassandra told me you were going to a séance tonight. I would like to attend with you.”
I shot her a grin. “You won’t find Coyote that way, you know.”
She didn’t smile in return. “This has nothing to do with my game with Coyote. And I have found him, several times. No, I want to know about this woman who is missing, and the sister who thinks her dead.”
I wondered at her interest, but I didn’t deny I’d feel better at a séance with a powerful goddess by my side. If Heather did manage to let anything through the ether, or worse, out of one of the vortexes, I had no doubt that Bear could handle it.
“I don’t see why not,” I said. “Heather likes a show, so the more the merrier.”
We reached the hotel’s front door. I stopped, looking it over in surprise, then I warmed with anger.
I’d replaced the door, made by an artisan in Santa Fe, not long ago. His first door had been destroyed in one of my many adventures. The second one he’d finished was as nice—the wood was old and well-polished with age, the aura of it deep and resonating with contentment.
White chalk marks now snaked all the way up one side of the door and halfway across the top of the frame, signs I didn’t recognize. They weren’t Wiccan symbols, nor were they glyphs.
They also weren’t magic. Mick and I warded this hotel with invisible sigils, and these markings hadn’t touched those, nor did the chalk vibrate with any kind of spell. Also, they hadn’t been here when I’d opened for the morning.
“What the hell?”
I looked at Bear, but she was eyeing them with the same puzzlement.
Mick opened the door, as though he’d seen us coming. He’d donned chaps and motorcycle boots, ready to ride off again east to talk to dragons.
“Slayers’ marks,” he said. He frowned as he ran blunt fingers over the symbols. “It’s how they communicate with each other. Marks the abode of a Nightwalker and tells whether they’ve been successful in the kill. In this case, no.”
“They’re using my hotel doorway as a bulletin board?”
“It’s both a brag sheet and for safety. They sign in before they go on the kill, in case they need someone to pull their balls out of the fire. It’s like signing in with park rangers before you hike a long trail.”
I clenched my hands, my anger tasting sour. “You know a lot about slayers. Dealt with them before, have you?”
Mick looked away. “Let’s just say we’ve tangled.”
“You tangle with a lot of things.”
“I’ve been around a long time. The way to deal with slayers’ marks is soap and water. I’ll have Julia or Olivia wash them off.” He named my two maids, cousins of Maya Medina, my electrician. They were young and working their way through college, and had agreed to work for me despite all the stories about the weird shit that happened in Janet’s hotel. They were local and therefore inured to weird shit by this time.
“I bet that rat bastard in the bar did these before he gave me his friendly warning.” I hadn’t paid any attention to the front door on my way to the bar, having walked around from the back.
Bear skimmed her hand above the marks, sunlight catching on the silver of her many rings. “Mmm. Not a nice message.”
“You can read that?” I asked.
She nodded without conceit. “The translation is simple.” Her fingers floated above the marks as she read. There is a Nightwalker in this house. I claim him. The kill extends to those protecting him.”
My anger boiled to compete with the afternoon heat. “He has balls.”
Bear gave me a grave look. “Do not dismiss the threat because he is only human and has no magic. Humans have killed most of the magical things in this world. Look around you.”
She had a point. So many vastly powerful beings tried to best me and Mick that I sometimes forgot to take the smaller threats seriously. But if I hadn’t been awakened by the wind chimes last night, Ansel might have been a smear on my back porch this morning.
I went inside, calling to Olivia to please go soap off the doorframe. She looked irritated and said a few choice words in Spanish to whoever had made extra work for her. She was related to Maya all right.
Bear had vanished by the time I came back out, but I was no longer shocked at the way she came and went without warning. She had much in common with Coyote, who’d she claimed, to my vast surprise, was her husband.
Mick straddled his big bike, which he’d brought around front, preparing to leave. I closed my hand over his where his rested on the handlebar.
“You can’t interrogate Drake on the phone?” I worried about him every time he went to the dragon compound, though the dragons had more or less promised not to touch him. But if anyone could bend rules, it was a dragon.
“Better to talk to dragons face to face,” Mick said. “Trust me.”
“It’s not face to face I worry about, but flame to flame.”
He chuckled like I was joking. I wasn’t.
He leaned down and kissed me. I touched his cheek, wishing he’d stay, but also knowing I had to stop hovering around him, babying him. He was a grown dragon. I had to let him go.
I kissed him again, didn’t miss his promising look, then he started up the bike and rode out of the parking lot.
I’d almost lost him this winter, forever. Paranoia was a bitch.
*** *** ***
The rest of the day passed uneventfully, except for the crap that goes along with running a hotel. Clogged drain in room Four. Loose tile in the hall. A pair of low-level witches complaining about the noises in their bedroom, which turned out to be the magic mirror teasing them.
Those with minor magic can hear something when the mirror makes noise, and it plays things up by moaning and screeching like special effects in a low-budget movie. The witches could hear only muffled sounds, but I, of course, got the full force when I walked into their bedroom. The magic mirror was channeling through the mundane mirror over their dresser, wailing and moaning like a stage banshee.
I didn’t want to let on that I had a magic mirror in here. Even the weakest witch can use one to her benefit, but the mirror’s current owner has to die before it can be used by the successor. Don’t think that doesn’t deter a mage who really wants a mirror.
I positioned myself in the middle of their bedroom, raised my hands, and shouted the magic words: “Would you shut up!”
“Aw, come on. Don’t ruin it for me. Let me have my fun.”
“I banish thee, evil thing,” I said loudly.
“Make me,” the mirror said, and made a raspberry noise.
The witches held each other while I walked closer to the wall on which the mirror hung. I said in a low voice, “If you don’t stop it, I’ll tell Mick to flame you.”
It was tough to kill a magic mirror, even to melt it, but Mick’s fire could make it suffer for a while. I’d seen Mick hurt it before.
“Oh, that is so not fair.”
“I don’t care about being fair; I’m trying to run a hotel. You have a cushy pl
ace here. Don’t wreck it, or I’ll toss you out with the trash.”
The mirror went silent, and I held my breath. It was supposed to respond to my every command, but the mirror constantly figured out ways around that when it wanted to.
“All right.” The mirror heaved a sigh, which made the glass rattle. “I’ll shut up. But I’m not withdrawing from this room. They’re a couple, and no way am I not watching that.”
I knew I shouldn’t be disgusted with an inanimate object, but the mirror was a complete pervert. “If they complain again, you’re out of here.” I turned to the two young witches, who watched me in awe and admiration. “The demon was trying to come in through the mirror,” I said. “I’ve banished it for now, but just in case, you might want to put a blanket over the mirror at night.”
They nodded, eyes wide. Behind me the mirror said, “Aw, now that’s just mean.”
Tough. I ignored it and walked out.
*** *** ***
Ansel hadn’t woken before I left for the séance, but I wanted to hear what Laura’s sister had to say. I’d shake Ansel’s story out of him when I got back.
Cassandra drove me and Bear—who’d showed up again as we were leaving—to Magellan two miles south of my hotel, Cassandra’s look still disapproving. When she dropped us off at Paradox, I thought she’d admonish me to be careful, but she said nothing. Cassandra put her car in gear and drove on toward the apartment she shared with her shape-shifter girlfriend.
Rows of wind chimes whispered as we entered the store, letting in the warm summer wind from outside, the air inside layered with the scents of incense and sage. Trays upon trays of crystals glittered in the central aisles, and one wall was covered with books on every topic from places to visit around Magellan to spells using sex energy to ways to communicate with the dead.
Heather stretched out her bangled hands as she rustled forward. “So glad you could come. Is this your friend called Bear?” Heather bowed and a said a few words in mispronounced Diné.
Nightwalker Page 5